According toHarrisvotes.org with 733 out of 734 precincts reporting Annise Parker with 81,652 votes is defeating Gene Locke who has 70,631 votes, in other words, by about 54% to 46%.

This was a run-off election for this office as well as other local positions. Turn-out for run-off elections in Houston has been traditionally low. (That’s for you complainers who on other sites have been commenting that only a small percentage of Houston’s population voted for Annise. That’s been the way it has been for a long time. City elections in Houston just don’t coincide with national and state elections, so the voters who do go to the polls really have an interest in voting.) Only a bit more than 150,000 ballots were cast, or about 15% of the registered voters in the fourth largest city of the U.S. Houston has approximately 2.2 million people living within its city limits, but there around 6 million living in the Houston metro area.

Just to put things in perspective, Annise Parker has been selected to oversee a city that is larger than 15 states in the U.S. (including Nebraska, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Sarah Palin’s Alaska (which has about 600,000) and even quite a few countries in the world.

In commenting about Annise’s sexuality, some news sites have noted that Locke would have been only Houston’s second African-American mayor. I haven’t seen anyone mention that Annise is just the second female mayor in its history. Kathy Whitmire was Houston’s mayor from 1982 to 1991 during some of the city’s worst economic days–the oil “bust” of the mid-80s. She was a popular mayor despite getting a lot of flack from the “good ol’ boys”.

Maybe Annise’s election will shine new light on our city and show people in other parts of the U.S. and the rest of the world what a fresh, diverse city Houston has become.

I met Annise for the first time more than 20 years ago and have always found her personable and most of all real. She is a person, whom I think, will be a mayor whom all Houstonians can be proud and will make the naysayers change their minds.